Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— Do they do this celebration every year? Dylan asks.

— Yeah, on Halloween the kids go trick-or-treating, and at Guy Fawkes they all dress up again and get to stay up as late as they want.

Dylan watches Constance. She is straight-up-and-down sinew and muscle and bone. Her eyes flash in the cutout of her wolf-mask and you can tell it has been made from a real wolf pelt and this Alistair guy has made it for her with skill and love.

— What did you come as, Dylan?

Stella is in front of him and staring at him, and her wolf-mother is watching him now and the man she is talking to looks a lot older than Constance.

— See that shimmer in the sky! A full aurora borealis is due, Barnacle says.

— You didn’t come as anything, did you? Can you even speak?

— I didn’t know it was fancy dress.

— Leave him alone, Stella, he’s feeling a bit peaky. What are you anyway — are you a bogey?

— The guy’s totally melting! Stella shouts.

Kids point and laugh. The plastic Girls’ World head on the top is melting and Barnacle stares at his own shoes. Dylan imagines the guy must spend his whole life staring at those shoes, like he is an old man cursed for cutting off a hundred soldiers’ feet in some past life, so now — no matter how beautiful the scene before him — he has to stare at his shoes before all things. Barnacle glances up at him, head turned to the left, a long face with flaccid chins.

— You don’t want to go for that one, he says.

— What one?

Dylan shifts uneasily and wishes he’d brought more to drink and thinks it is time he quit his (every-other-day) attempt to not smoke any more, and he wonders if the site shop is still open.

— Constance. See the man she’s talking to, that’s Alistair. He’s Stella’s biological father. They never lived together but she was with him for a long time. He’s back with his wife now, and then there’s the younger one, Caleb. He goes abroad each year and then he comes back.

— She’s not with either of them any more.

— Not this month.

— There’s nothing to say she’ll go back to either of them, Barnacle.

— No, but they’re a love triangle that has lasted over twenty years, that’s all I’m saying. Constance has taken so much shit for having two lovers over the years, never living with either of them, raising a child that way. The woman knows what she wants. Falling in love with a third won’t change that.

Barnacle smiles and extends a paw and it looks exactly like that, a soft curved paw, nail-less, like he’s been de-clawed. Everything is stranger and warmer and wilder — the kids louder and their teeth shinier, and spirals of light against darkness and sparklers and fireworks whizzing up from miles away.

— Are you alright?

Constance is in front of him. She pulls off her wolf’s head and her hair is stuck down and white and her skin is pale, so pale it glows, and she barely has eyebrows or eyelashes, which makes the grey of her eyes particularly clear. She glances at him and Barnacle looks awkwardly up at her and grins.

— Constance!

— Barnacle, you’re not scaring the fresh blood, are you?

— He doesn’t seem easily scared. I was just asking him why he moved — here!

The old man gesticulates, a conductor before an orchestra, his large hands palm up and drawing some strange pattern on the air. Constance, with the wolf-head in one hand, casually accepts a bottle of beer from a crate going by. She grabs a second, hands it to Dylan. They lock eyes. She tilts the bottle, still looking at him, and gestures to Stella by holding up her watch. Over on the other side of the bonfire an old couple are dancing, all stomachs and chins and an air of utter bliss as they hold each other and gently step forward — one-two, side-side, one-two. Barnacle shuffles back toward his caravan and jabs his finger up and mutters, and there are ribbons of light across the sky, billowing scarfs of purple with tiny inroads of green.

The bonfire is so hot, Dylan has to step back; flames lick around the horse painting from his caravan and it paws the ground before it goes up in flames, and the ground is mush under his sneakers. He looks up and she is not there and he looks around but he can only see the satanist kids walking their cat back to their caravan. A pitbull is up at their caravan window waiting for them.

— Do you want a sparkler, Dylan? Stella races around the fire.

— Thanks for asking me for dinner and not telling your mum it was a grown-up neighbour coming, not one of your school friends!

— I don’t have school friends. Do you fancy my mum? Stella asks.

— No.

— Liar.

Barnacle has settled on his porch, waiting for the fireworks. Loud bangs echo across the green as a young guy lights them, one by one. The area is cordoned off but it’s so close, if a rocket went backwards it could easily take out an eye or set a costume alight in the crowd. The young guy lights a Catherine wheel and it fizzes on the air, then sounds like a rope being pulled, and then the wheel is turning, shooting out tiny sparks in different colours until white electricity rockets up into the air, then a tiny dot exploding into arcs of sparkling light. Constance walks back over. The fire crackles but it is somehow distant and everything around them gets blurrier, and he is so high the ground is going up and down in gentle waves. What he needs is more beer.

— Where’s your girlfriend then, Dylan?

— Why do you ask, Constance?

She grins and takes a swig of beer and looks away, at the fire, over the green, then back at him.

— Just making conversation, she says.

— No, you’re not.

The sounds of fireworks whizz and the hiss of the fire and kids and clatter and she looks at him. Dylan resists pulling a strand of hair off her face. Constance flicks the ash off her cigarette and then she is walking away, raising her hand — a silhouette of wolf-ears and her tail flicking its way around the flames.

THERE ARE three suns in the sky. Constance raises the axe and there is a swoop-thud-crack as she brings it down. A log splits cleanly in two, falls onto a pile of softer shavings. She stacks the wood, straightens up, her hand on the small of her back.

Stella shades her eyes so she can see all three suns.

It’s the most amazing thing she has ever seen in her life.

She frames the suns as if she’s looking at them through an old film camera. The middle sun is the brightest and the two on either side are a tiny bit smaller and more hazy, but it is clearly suns in triplicate. The middle sun radiates a large white halo, which arcs out almost far enough to touch the suns on either side. Trails of light go up into the clouds. Stella tips her head back and narrows her eyes until sunlight makes the insides of her half-closed eyelids a warm blood-orange. Light soaks into her chromosomes.

— What are they called again, Mum?

— Parhelia. It’s a phenomenon that looks like three suns, but the two on either side are just reflected light — it’s something to do with ice-crystals.

She likes watching these suns and those wispy little clouds. It does something relaxing to the eyes, like the seagulls dive-bombing down at Fort Harbour, dropping out of the sky, then the splash. Or when the mackerel are migrating, rippling the water as they swim along. Clean. Easy. Dylan appears behind them. He stares at the suns. Stella sees herself as the middle sun, but she reckons he is looking at the parhelia and seeing all three of them. If that was their life. That would be something. Adults are so stupid. It’s clear they like each other. Her mum shades her own eyes and turns toward the three suns.